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Privacy Notice Information
This page is designed to help businesses,
especially BBBOnLine Reliability seal holders, to create an online
privacy notice for use on the web. The Code of Online Business Practices
requires that BBBOnLine Reliability seal holders have some sort of
privacy notice on their website. Each notice must be based on the following
five elements:
This webpage will attempt to give some resources to
use in developing your privacy notice. Whatever final notice you develop is
up to you, and will be your responsibility to maintain. The Better Business
Bureau does not recommend any one set of privacy practices, nor any single
privacy notice.
Below is a sample privacy notice
that you may want to use as a guide for your privacy notice. Note that
there is a place for your company name or URL in the first paragraph, and
a
place for your phone number and email address in the last paragraph. Please
make sure to personalize these. DO NOT simply cut-and-paste this
policy as is.
Privacy
Notice
This privacy notice discloses the privacy
practices for (website address). This privacy notice applies
solely to information collected by this web site. It will notify you of
the following:
1.
What personally identifiable information is collected from
you through the web site, how it is used and with whom it may be
shared.
2.
What choices are available to you regarding the use of
your data.
3.
The security procedures in place to protect the misuse of
your information.
4.
How you can correct any inaccuracies in the information.
Information Collection, Use, and
Sharing
We are the sole owners of the information collected on this site. We only have access to/collect information that you voluntarily give us via email or other direct contact from you. We will not sell or rent this information to anyone. We will use your information to respond to you,
regarding the reason you contacted us. We will not share your
information with any third party outside of our organization, other
than as necessary to fulfill your request, e.g. to ship an order.
Unless you ask us not to, we may contact you via
email in the future to tell you about specials, new products or
services, or changes to this privacy policy.
Your Access to and Control Over
Information
You may opt out of any future contacts from us at any time. You can do the following at any time by contacting us via the email address or phone number given on our website:
Security
We take precautions to protect your information. When you submit sensitive information via the website, your information is protected both online and offline. Wherever we collect sensitive information (such as
credit card data), that information is encrypted and transmitted to us
in a secure way. You can verify this by looking for a closed lock icon
at the bottom of your web browser, or looking for "https" at
the beginning of the address of the web page.
While we use encryption to protect sensitive
information transmitted online, we also protect your information
offline. Only employees who need the information to perform a specific
job (for example, billing or customer service) are granted access to
personally identifiable information. The computers/servers in which we
store personally identifiable information are kept in a secure
environment.
If you feel that we are not abiding by
this privacy policy, you should contact us immediately via telephone at
XXX YYY-ZZZZ or via email.
You can print or save the above privacy policy to your
computer here: Download
sample privacy policy (MS Word document)
The above notice (or policy)
probably does not describe your privacy practices exactly. You need to
personalize your statement to fit your business practices. Here are some
sample clauses that you can use to help describe other specific practices
that fit your business model.
Optional
Clauses
If your site
has a registration page that customers must complete to do business
with you, insert a paragraph like this in your privacy notice:
Registration In order to use this website, a user must first complete the registration form. During registration a user is required to give certain information (such as name and email address). This information is used to contact you about the products/services on our site in which you have expressed interest. At your option, you may also provide demographic information (such as gender or age) about yourself, but it is not required. If you take and fill orders on your
site, insert a paragraph like this in your privacy notice:
Orders We request information from you on our order form. To buy from us, you must provide contact information (like name and shipping address) and financial information (like credit card number, expiration date). This information is used for billing purposes and to fill your orders. If we have trouble processing an order, we'll use this information to contact you. If you use cookies or other devices
that track site visitors, insert a paragraph like this in your privacy
notice:
Cookies We use "cookies" on this site. A cookie is a piece of data stored on a site visitor's hard drive to help us improve your access to our site and identify repeat visitors to our site. For instance, when we use a cookie to identify you, you would not have to log in a password more than once, thereby saving time while on our site. Cookies can also enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance the experience on our site. Usage of a cookie is in no way linked to any personally identifiable information on our site. If other organizations use cookies or
other devices that track site visitors to your site, insert a paragraph
like this in your privacy notice:
Some of our business partners may use cookies on our site (for example, advertisers). However, we have no access to or control over these cookies. If you share information collected on
your site with other parties, insert one or more of these paragraphs in
your privacy notice:
Sharing We share aggregated demographic information with our partners and advertisers. This is not linked to any personal information that can identify any individual person. And/or:
We use an outside shipping company to ship orders, and a credit card processing company to bill users for goods and services. These companies do not retain, share, store or use personally identifiable information for any secondary purposes beyond filling your order. And/or:
We partner with another party to provide specific services. When the user signs up for these services, we will share names, or other contact information that is necessary for the third party to provide these services. These parties are not allowed to use personally identifiable information except for the purpose of providing these services. If your site has links to other sites,
you might insert a paragraph like this in your privacy notice:
Links This web site contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of any other site that collects personally identifiable information. If you ever collect data through
surveys or contests on your site, you might insert a paragraph like
this in your privacy notice:
Surveys & Contests From time-to-time our site requests information via surveys or contests. Participation in these surveys or contests is completely voluntary and you may choose whether or not to participate and therefore disclose this information. Information requested may include contact information (such as name and shipping address), and demographic information (such as zip code, age level). Contact information will be used to notify the winners and award prizes. Survey information will be used for purposes of monitoring or improving the use and satisfaction of this site. You can print or save the above privacy policy to your
computer here: Download
Optional Clauses (MS Word document)
Other sources of information on creating privacy
policies include:
·
Understanding
Privacy's site provides guidance on why online privacy is important
and how businesses can create policies that fit their practices. See
especially the section on Create
an Online Privacy Policy .
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